I just wanted to post up the experience I've had with the Drupal + E-Commerce package over the last month and a half of learning.
My wife and I started a company selling video games and other techy toys (mp3 players, dvd players and such) based in New Hampshire, USA. The site, http://www.techdiversions.com has been up since last Thursday without any nasty issues (any issues, so far have been my fault).
I've learned enough about Drupal to be dangerous. I've also learned PHP in the process. The E-Commerce package seemed perfect for our needs as a small company startup with very little budget yet flexible enough to do anything I could think up.
The site design was worked out a few weeks prior, but overall, it was about a month of work between myself and my graphic designing buddy.
I really didn't know which modules would help me out and which I'd have to create, so the only module I've adopted besides the base Drupal stuff and the E-Commerce package was image_attach because it gave me a nice way to related my tangible product nodes to my products themselves.
I built my own product relations as well. If a customer clicks on an item in any of the lists of items it will bring up information about that product (a node) which also has four related products (which are related by taxonamy id).
The largest issue, which cost me many hours of labor, fell in the product display, which was a large block of PHP code, but does exactly what I want. The second issue was using images on my buttons because IE6 sends button coordinates and not the VALUE of the button (so the 'op' name couldn't be associated with a 'post', 'preview', 'submit', etc.) So I had to hack a bit in the cart module to get that to work. This was only a problem on pages that had two images.
My first stumbling block was backorder or "pre-order" in my case. I needed to allow people to order things that did not exist. I did this by creating negative stock values. A value of -2 is "pre-order" which will change the button to read as such, while a -1 is "coming soon" and 0 is "out of stock." Anything greater than zero is "Add To Cart."
My second stumbling block now is the fact that I cannot get USPS shipping quotes from Canada. The shipcalc module will allow for USPS domestic and UPS domestic/international but my customers will not be happy paying USD $27.00 for a UPS ground shipment of a .5lbs video game :-) So, my current challenge is writing up an International USPS xml query to the USPS international service so that Canadians can purchase from the site (right now they can call in to order). This is proving to be a difficult job, and if anyone has tackled that please let me know :-)
The E-Commerce package was flexible enough to allow me and my new PHP skills to get creative and design something that wasn't "cookie cutter" and could be developed as I saw it in my head. I know there are many areas I need to continue to learn for "version 2" of my site.
For all those that are working to build out the E-Commerce package as a great business solution - thank you. Life would be very painful without the work you guys have put in thus far and continue to put in. For those that answered my questions on the e-commerce mailing list - you were extremely helpful and I hope to repay some people with the experiences I've learned.
If anyone has any questions about the implementation or what I did to get around issues not yet developed in E-Commerce or otherwise, let me know.
Keep up the good work!
Derrick Schommer
www.techdiversions.com
Comments
Thanks, that's a great
Thanks, that's a great write-up!
Excellent work! Thumbnail
Excellent work!
Thumbnail display in Search results? Sample theme code?
Darly
The search results were
The search results were tough for me to figure out. I ended up catching the hook_search_item and running it through my own module to generate the code (I don't call any themes- just print out the HTML).
This isn't as impressive as it should be, I am going to change it to theme code with variables now that I know how to do it. I originally wrote the search before understanding all the beauty that is drupal :)
Derrick
Site looks excellent. Great
Site looks excellent. Great job! Glad to hear you were able to get it all done for free and learn a lot in the process. : )
It's a bit look like osCommerce
My first impression is like a bit osCommernce, but of course it remains fully drupal feel. Keep this good work. Not bad.
Domestic Helper
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Great Site!
Couple of observations...
I am thinking about multisites. I looks like you are using them.
http://www.techdiversions.com/hardware ...http://www.techdiversions.com/blog...
Great work...I wish I was closer...
Russ Griechen
Not sure what you mean by
Not sure what you mean by "multi-site". My site is one single site. Just different pages.
Derrick
Menus
Hi Derek, nice site.
Curious how you are managing the menus and sub-sections -- are those through taxonomies or some form of subproducts?
Thanks
-Greg
I learned taxonomy, and I
I learned taxonomy, and I got creative. There are a few flaws I want to fix over time, but I was green when I started.
What I did was build a taxonomy hierarchy for all the products, for example:
Games
- Console
- Wii
- Action
- Adventure
- Fighting
Then I wrote a php function that would build a product display like: http://www.techdiversions.com/wii_action
This would be something like: _displayCase( "Games >> Console >> Wii >> Action" );
This would render the page to the screen. My "string" is a list of the taxonomy hierarchy because "Action" is a taxonomy term that exists in ALL my consoles (so there is an Action for Wii and an Action for Xbox 360). I'm thinking of changing this to be "Wii Action" and "360 Action" so that "Action" is unique and I don't have to have a full breakdown of the hierarchy everytime I need to reference a game. It would also help when I implement the tagadelic tag cloud because the cloud has "Action" listed five times (once for every console!) and that's very unfriendly to the user.
Limitations to this is I only have one category per product but that's okay, for the most part, because each product only can be on ONE system. The only place this is false is pre-owned games... if I tag a game as "pre-owned" I cannot also take it as "action" thus all pre-owned products are grouped together - a limitation I can live with :)
Everything is based on taxonomy, even my "related products" which simply go through all products with the same taxonomy and render 5 random items.
Hope that helps.
Derrick
Views
Thanks for the reply. Heading down a similar path with a customized taxonomy pages, and menu links to those.
The product catalog in ecommerce seems to be left to taxonomy, I have also seen some folks using the Views module to accomplish their catalog. Although after playing with it for an hour - it didn't seem to have much I needed. Surprised that the catalog support in ecomm is not richer - or perhaps I'm not there yet.
Anyway, thanks for your detailed reply
-G
Taxonomy is where it's at
I'm unsure how many big sites are using e-commerce that don't look towards larger e-commerce solutions (read: very expensive ones). For a shop with two or three products, I think the stock e-commerce stuff works fine, but if you're looking for a large variety of items under many categories you have to get creative. I have over 200 products with a few varients (new, used, like-new) and tagging them with terms isn't as intuitive as one would expect but I got used to it.
Once I understood the concept of taxonomy it was made a bit easier. At first I was confused on how to correlate "terms" with product types. The only thing I don't have (and don't know if e-commerce can do) is product variants like Small, Medium, Large, etc. I'm not sure how you'd tag those guys.
Derrick
Wow, I've been working so
Wow, I've been working so hard I forgot to checkout the comments from my site post :) I have gotten a lot of contacts straight from techdiversions.com and I'm happy to answer questions (I've only had one user who's e-mail bounced back when I tried responding).
Just an update, I've re-written the homepage to be "3 column" for easier use and remove the drop-down product selections. My current goals are to get down any barriers a user may have to buying. I've also done some work to get better search-engine-optimization, such as adding more "text" to the product listings, like: http://www.techdiversions.com/NintendoWii_catalog
I also tried to do a very "basic" version of the product list: http://www.techdiversions.com/products to help users that a) don't like to search and b) don't know where things are categorized (i.e. is Super Paper Mario an "adventure" game or "action" game).
I've written a very basic newsletter module that works with MailLoop (from Internet Marketing) to try to enlist more users. I also have a basic opt-in for user registration.
Some things I've learned, users really don't understand the Drupal login concept. Entering a username and an e-mail address THEN checking their e-mail for confirmation seems to be a very difficult challenge for them. I've even tried making the text on the registration page bigger which reads "Your password will be MAILED TO YOU" :) Still didn't work. So I've installed logintaboggan, worked fine, and now I'll see if that keeps some users coming back. I don't want to lose sales because of login confusion.
I wrote a front-page module as well, so I could update the front page without having to write HTML or a template. Just to make my life a bit easier when I get lazy and don't want to update the main page.
Another new area, I added a podcast feature which uses a custom module to build a 'podcast' table and query it for episodes (http://www.techdiversions.com/tdgamingpodcast). The modules supplied on drupal weren't good for me because my podcasts are hosted on libsyn.com and not locally.
So far I'm not so impressed with the blog module but I live with it. I wish it showed more than one blog at a time and had a few more configuration features. I've 'hacked' it a bit to use URL aliases, build a "permalink" feature and a 'catagory' feature for blogs.
So far so good, site has been running since late Oct 2006, we've had customers, we've had frauders - the works. The site hasn't been compromised (but it's attempted at least once a day), google likes us (Page Rank 5 already) and we've had sales (yay!). We're still not out of the red yet, but it's a startup, gotta struggle, right?
If anyone has any questions, feel free to use the 'contact' form on techdiversions and I'll answer any questions about the site. I also monitor the e-commerce mailing list and try to help out when I can.
Thanks for the feedback folks, it's appreciated!
Derrick
awsome job
Hi Derrick, what you created from drupal e-commerce looks great.
If i'm not asking too much it's possible to post a list of all your additional modules ?
thanks
mailloop
I would love to integrate MailLoop with Drupal. Would you be willing to send over some tips on the integration module you created?
Good job!
Can you provide details on how you themed the cart?
Good job!
Can you provide details on how you themed the cart?
HI
Just last month I completed my site in which i integrated the drupal & the GIS technologies including the Gmap.
Now I'm planning to develop an e-commerce portal, using the drupal.
So I wanted the certain references can any body suggest me some references which may help me in the tenure of the development.
Regards
Ishvinder
Migrated to WordPress?
I thinks the site mentioned in this post (http://www.techdiversions.com/) has been converted to WordPress. Shouldn't this post therefore be removed?